This article contends that contemporary writings on the representation of offending women provide a simplified outline of ‘available’ representations. To nuance and further complicate our understanding, this study lays bare the most salient media characterisations of women perpetrators in Swedish press. In contrast to much previous research, it covers various offence types and an extensive period of time (1905–2015) and moves away from the focus on mega-cases and cases of extreme deviance. First, the study illustrates that characterisations are contingent and that there is a greater variety in ‘available’ representations than previous research suggests. The characterisations rather tend to move between and beyond the categories of bad, mad and sad. Second, the study makes visible the narrative continuities (across cases and over time) and analyses the social and cultural work of gendered characterisations. While steering attention to sense-making and the construction of familiarity, the article complicates the assumption that women’s deviance primarily or necessarily is represented as otherness.
The present article seeks to add further empirical nuance and specification to ongoing debates on the androcentric biases of historical and present research on crime. Using a mixed-methods design, it examines gender differences in theorizing and how women are represented in Swedish crime-related research between 1920 and 2015. On the one hand, the quantitative analysis reveals that explanations and proposed solutions to crime are more gender-neutral than previous research tends to suggest. On the other hand, the qualitative analysis uncovers how women are rendered visible almost exclusively in discussions on crime that concern issues linked to the body, sex and sexuality, or victimhood and vulnerability. Generally, in the Swedish context, characterized by the establishment of a strong welfare state, women and women's criminality have primarily been given relevance in the context of larger socio-economic problems and/or reforms.
The present article advances a conceptual framework for the critical study of the representation of war and military violence. Essentially, it offers a conceptualization of dis/appearances of violence in public discourse, which combines the concepts of in/visibilization, de/ naturalization, and dis/identification. Though they overlap and interweave in terms of what they capture, all three are considered relevant to fully elaborate how violence may dis/appear in narratives on war-like operations. Furthermore, the article exemplifies how one may make use of the conceptual framework, by exploring the representation of violence in Swedish public political debate at the time of active engagement in peace-enforcement and offensive military operations. More specifically, the empirical illustration critically examines the parliamentary debates on ONUC in Congo 1960-1964 and ISAF in Afghanistan 2002. The analysis reveals and details how violence continuously tends to disappear as a reality, as a dilemma and/or as Sweden's own practice and choice. At present, the scholarly debate mainly focuses on the US or the UK. To advance our understanding of the ways in which violence is normalized and made possible, we need refined conceptual tools that allow us to explore the complexity and political work of representations of war and violence in various contexts.
The chapter critically engages with the literature on combat motivation, morale, and cohesion; it contends that historical and contemporary scholarly debates on why soldiers fight have largely overlooked and diminished the role of society and socio-political discourses, whilst keeping an unnecessarily narrow focus on the here and now of combat. Inspired by critical war studies and the cultural study of war, the chapter encourages students, scholars, and practitioners to consider and problematize the home/front relationship and its practical implications for military operations. It accentuates that the will to fight is constantly in the making, inherently unstable, and always already socially and historically situated; fundamentally, the will to fight is contingent on (shifting) notions of legitimacy in society at large, whereas public discourse in turn is shaped by the experience of combat and its representations. Thus, interlinkages between society’s and soldiers’ construction of meaning are worth uncovering and theorizing further.
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